The negro faces America

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. The Blind Spot 1

II. Why Race Riots? 35

Foreword

I SHOULD apologize for so impressionistic a study as this of American color problems, if apologies were in order. But social science, such as it is, has evaded the subject. Much of what has been offered to lay readers calls to mind the acrid comment of Mr. Van Wyck Brooks that "to be a prophet in America it is not enough to be totally uninformed; one must also have a bland smile." I should like to banish the bland smile from discussion of American color problems and to challenge the shabby indifference with which the wrongs of colored people in the United States are

greeted.

With this humane intent my expositions and my interpretations are perhaps complicated. If the result be a clearer field than has existed heretofore for research and social invention, I shall consider the polemic elements in a work, which should have been undertaken by a trained sociologist, to have been not wholly unjustified. In extenuation for having written I have no plea except that of my observations, which must be judged

Jl

FOREWORD

accurate or inaccurate on their merits. For much of the material which made those observations possible I am indebted to the officers and to members of the staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

H. J. S.

Introduction

The uniqueness and pathos of the Negro problem in the United States rest in the fact that so few Americans recognize it as a problem. The average attitude is that a pretty good job is beingmade of a very trying situation; as to the occasional suggestion of possible tragic developments in the future, unless the whole matter is definitely taken in hand, a flippant and naive remark as to the valor of American manhood is usually deemed sufficient. Among the more serious agencies at work, aiming at a more enlightened attitude toward the race problem, may be mentioned the intensely race-conscious activity of DuBois and the broader and less emotionalized activity, on a national basis, of Spingarn. To these must now be added the name of Mr. Herbert J. Seligmann, the young author of this volume.

In close touch with the scientific and social facts, the author reviews the conclusions of anthropologists with reference to alleged racial differences in capacity, analyzes the social and psychological factors at work in different parts of the country where the race question is acute, lays bare the sinister influence of selfish and callous individuals on whom must in large n

\r

INTRODUCTION

ure rest the responsibility for the more tragic aspects of the Negro situation, and by his sympathetic and obviously open-minded attitude toward the future almost succeeds in creating a definitely optimistic mood.

It is to be hoped that this will not be the last of the author's contributions, and that he will before long have the opportunity to deal with ever-increasing technical skill, with the several special aspects of the Negro pro]>lem which have long been awaiting an enthusiastic, able, and courageous protagonist.

A. A. GOLDENWEISER.

The New School for Social Research, New York.

r

INTO the nerve fiber of the United States ''■ are woven strands which bind Negro and white Americans. The Civil War lacerated the nation's nervous system. Slight occasion only is needed in order to recall suffering and hatred to memories still fiercely active. The condition of public feeling with regard to race is one of disease. The past lives on unconqu^red and poisons the present. Slavery is legally abolished, but neither white men nor Negro men are free of a constant preoccupation with color. It is still possible to divide public opinion in the United States with regard to race problems on the artificial basis of geography, and this division is reinforced by tradition. A vast discussion goes on, punctuated by race riots and lynchings, thunderous

with invective, in which the conversational 1 1 tone of the scientist is almost inaudible. Many of the disputants' feelings, passionately intense, colored with every sort of gossip, rumor, and half-truth, never find their way to frank expression in words. The emotions that have been at one time or another fanned into flame as between white man and Negro; conflicts over field, shop, and factory; pride of race and assertions of human prerogatives ; the rights of man and the defense of womanhood; education, political contest, the home, public travel, have all become involved. Last of all, the emergence of the United States from her "splendid isolation" through war into the desolation of a crumbling world has been accompanied by new and ominous twinges in the nerves of race relations.

It would be difficult, if not impossible, to point to a single political or social problem of importance in the United States which does not debouch upon race and what by common consent is known as 'Hlie" race problem. School, home, factory, mine, farm, the polling-booth, the railway, are all made its vehicles. Every manifestation of the social will hesitates at the inevitable race considerations.

This welter has been lumped into a "problem" whose symbol is black. Those who wear the burnished livery of the sun have been dehumanized and made into problems also — from twelve million to fifteen million problems, children in the cradle, school boys and girls, men and women. Negro Americans, on the other hand, fiercely resent being looked upon as a problem. They feel themselves to be a challenge that may well become retribution. The challenge of the race problem confronts all Americans, white and black. North and South. Few Southerners but have learned the history of New England merchant captains' adventures in rum and slaves on the west coast of Africa or have forgotten the memorable carrying trade. The Negro is constantly reminded that what he does or fails to do is visited upon his race, and that he is his colored brother's keeper. The white man of the North, who might be inclined to lull himself into forgetfulness, wakes at the sound of shooting down his streets. He has heard echoes of race and the race problem in the speeches of United States Senators discussing the League of Nations. Any one even slightly informed of American institutions, traditions, politics, art, society, has known that all the nation has been in the same boat with regard to the race problem. The United States has at various times been known abroad as the nation of jazz. It is not only the antagonisms of race that make the land conscious of itself; its arts and its amusements have begun to feed this consciousness. In no activity is art so near to amusement and amusement so near art as in the peculiar rhythms of American Negro song. Unfortunately, before it was realized that Americans cannot afford to be cosmopolitan when they speak of commerce, and parochial when they think and speak of race, race relations had to be made into melodrama. In a world composed for the most part of colored races, fully embarked on new adventures toward autonomy, Americans had to be reminded not only by a great northward migration of colored people during the war, but by race riots, chiefly in 1919, that new movements and aspirations were stirring on their own continent. It was blood-letting in the streets of American cities that accomplished anxious heart-searchings that were long overdue.

A first step in an attempt upon the hates, distrusts, and preconceptions clustered ?bout race is to separate and examine them. There is, in fact, no race problem in the United

THE BLIND SrOT

States. There are a thousand problems with which race is more or less connected, frequently deliberately connected for an ulterior motive, in the absence of organic connection between race distinctions and the subject at issue. To take these thousand problems of education, politics, industry, and lump them is to give over to emotion w^hat should be the province of study and social invention. The process is best illustrated by two questions: "Do you want your daughter to marry a nigger.?" is a Southern summation of and for white men. That is a reduction of the race problem to what many conceive to be its lowest and most fundamental terms. '* Shall I be set apart like a leper, insulted, denied justice, and lynched because I am accused of wanting to marry the white man's daughter?" retorts the Negro. "And shall the white man have children by my daughter and be prohibited by law from marrying her.^'" To leave race relations at this point is to create an impasse. There is no answer to either of the questions. If every time the Negro demands better housing and schooling for his children, justice in the courts, equal opportunity for employment, he is to be denied them on the ground that it means race amalgamation, there is nothing for it but to leave the issue to arms and to maintain a white army sufficient to keep the subject race in subjection. Fortunately there is much evidence that race problems are not merely biological, that they are susceptible to social invention and intelligent manipulation. Such evidence was presented as perhaps never before in the race riots that occurred in the United States during and immediately after the end of the World War.

If white Americans are minded to accept the evidence so crudely offered, they may be in a position to absorb consciously, as they have not done, the cultural contributions of their colored neighbors. Colored Americans may then be liberated from the pressure w^hich no one realizes better than their own leaders is cramping their efforts, making them provincial and yet critically aloof, bitterly conscious of themselves as a hostile group in an ill-ordered community. Granted that there are distrusts and hostilities that come of superficial differences between men, like color, or like follicular structure of the hair differentiating kinky from straight, it is a savage thing for white men who call themselves civilized to let such j)rimitive impulses determine their conduct. Yet the history of race relations in the United States, a history only as yet included in larger and more diffuse studies, or suggested in biographies, essays, and memoirs, will show the dominance of these primitive impulses in an attack upon the nation's deepest-rooted and most pressing difficulties.

To those who insist that racial antipathies must be allowed to determine race relations there are two replies: First, that to do so brings, as it has brought, violence. Second, that there is overwhelming evidence to show that race antipathy is not even skin deep. The decrease in illicit sex relations between white and colored people of the South, where intermarriage is illegal, is due not to instinctive aversion, but to the pressure of public opinion. When it used to be regarded as an entertaining foible for white men of prominence to maintain colored families w^ithout benefit of clergy, the practice was fairly common. Now that exposure of such relationships would ruin any aspirant's political and social career, white men are more wary and illicit relationships of the sort are said to be decreasing in number. A dangerous error of persons who insist on the validity of "racial

THE NEGRO FACES AjMERICA

antipathy" is to assume that the exceptional conditions which prevail in the United States are typicaL But nowhere else have economic considerations and race relations been joined as issues in armed conflict as in the Civil War. Of Latin America, Professor Shepherd tells us that "properly speaking there is no race question . . . because from the colonial period onward the ethnical elements have tended to become merged into a new division of mankind." ^ In the circumstances it is incumbent on the upholders of racial antipathy's function in a democracy to show that it is operative and effective.

Much of the bitterness that has befogged discussion of race problems has proceeded from ' observations honestly made in past years, but since discredited by anthropologists. Many passionate Unionists, during the Civil AYar even, were convinced of an essential "racial inferiority" of the Negro, and allowed their beliefs, on which investigation has thrown new light, to erect obstacles to Negro participation in the state and in society. No less a contributor to our knowledge than Louis Agassiz wrote in 1803 that

^ William R. Shepherd, Latin America, p. 123. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

on Egyptian monuments "the Negroes are so represented as to show that in natural propensities and mental abilities they were pretty much what we find them at the present day — indolent, playful, sensual, imitative, subservient, good-natured, versatile, unsteady in their purpose, devoted, and affectionate. . . . While Egypt and Carthage grew into powerful empires and attained a high degree of civilization; while in Babylon, Syria, and Greece were developed the highest culture of antiquity, the Negro race groped in barbarism and never originated a regular organization among themselves." The conclusions of Agassiz left him unprepared "to state what political privileges they are fit to enjoy^ now; though I have no hesitation in saying that they should be equal to other men before the law." 1

But since 1863 the sciences of men have become distrustful of "natural propensities"; and even of races which have been most carefully studied anthropologists hesitate to say what are their racial characteristics. Furthermore, modern anthropology does not credit white men with having changed racially,

* James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States, Vol. VI, Chap. XXXI, letter from Agassiz to Dr. Samuel G. Howe. 1863. Pp. 37. 38.

m so far as their natural propensities are concerned, since the Eg^^ptian artificers made the monuments to which Agassiz refers. It would be as fair to deduce the disposition of present-day white men from monuments contemporaneous w^ith those erected by the Pharaohs as to attach significance to the characters of ancient sculptured Negro faces. Comment of which that of Agassiz is t^^pical still passes current, however, and is given the force of dogma by those predisposed to it.

Many of the dogmas about the Negro which find astonishingly wide acceptance are of such general and inclusive nature that they can be immediately disposed of. For example, the one which has it that the Negro is by nature indolent and lacking in persistence, because he comes of a savage race and savages have those characteristics, is not borne out by observation. Savages of many tribes in various parts of the world display extraordinary pertinacity. With inferior implements they laboriously achieve results which the white man would hesitate to attempt because of the sustained and arduous labor involved. To cut down a tree with stone hatchets and then to make a canoe from the trunk by burning out the core is no task for the indolent or the man of unsteady purpose. All of the beliefs held about the Negro by white men, more or less misinformed, constitute one of the main problems of race in the United States. It is a problem intensified rather than lessened by such means of communication as the press. Whether or not the Negro is what his bitterest enemy says of him hardly matters. If any body of public opinion can be organized upon misstatements as a foundation, all public discussion wall be colored by the most obvious fabrications and absurdities.

There is the utmost hesitance, for example, to trace to its lair the gossip from Civil War days w^hicli still lives on. The nation is exi:)ected, when enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is suggested, to thrill with horror at the mere thought of "Negro domination" in the South. If Negroes were conceived to be human beings like many another human being, educable and educated, adapted to the processes of American government and appreciative that liberty for oneself implies liberty for others, Negro domination would have no immense terrors. But paint the

Negro's portrait as of a sullen black brute, criminal when he has opportunity to be, intent upon debasing the limpid intellectuaHty of the superior race by admixing his own base blood, desirous chiefly of dining with the white man and of marrying his daughter, incapable of intellectual development after he has reached the age of fourteen years, then you have laid the basis for assertions like that of Senator John Sharpe Williams, that race transcends the Constitution; and for sympathetic response to the statement that, come what will, no Negro will ever vote in a state like South Carolina, where in 1910 there were 835,843 Negroes and 679,161 white men. Of misinformation and terror it is difficult to say which has played the greater part in preventing a decent adjustment of the Negro's claims to the ballot and to other prerogatives of citizenship.

It is possible to take any group of a race, as is frequently done in the case of Negroes, and point to its members as uneducated, vagrant, unfit for civic responsibilities. But to erect the ignorance of men, to whom their state has denied education, into a threat of domination by the ignorant and the brutal is as fantastic as to say that ignorance is proof of the usclcssness of education. Such absurdities would liardly be the province of serious discussion of race relations if they did not frequently even yet form the body of discussion in many parts of the United States. Much water has run under many bridges since President Andrew^ Johnson and a Congress he antagonized bungled the matter of readjusting the seceded Southern states to the Union.

But the South to-day still feeds upon the stories of carpet-bagger dominion, the *' black and tan" Constitutional Convention of Mississippi with its extravagance, and the financial orgies of Louisiana and South Carolina legislatures. Historians of the first rank, even, have not escaped the tendency to touch lightly the pride and the humiliation of men who found their former slaves not only no longer their possessions — an economic loss — but were expected to tolerate disfranchisement while those abhorred men voted. The present generation is in danger of hardening reticence into doctrine, of making monuments of past sorrows and humiliations which bar the way to effective discussion and progress. If, as is asserted, carpet-bag rule and the participation of uneducated Negroes in state government resulted in tragic waste and

THE NEGRO FACES AjMERICA

terrible conditions of social disorganization, it must still be borne in mind that men blame what they oppose for all their misfortunes rather than trace those misfortunes dispassionately to their source. With all the suffering and the losses imposed upon the South — as upon any region in which war is waged — the offer of Congress to the Southern states, "compared with the settlement of any other notable civil war by a complete victor," as James Ford Rhodes points out, was ''magnanimous in a high degree. It involved no executions, no confiscation of property, no imprisonments. ... It vouchsafed to the Southern states the management of their own local affairs subject to the recognition of the civil rights of the Negroes, to the Freedmen's Bureau limited in time, and to a temporary military occupation." History is irrelevant except as it continues to live on in the present. And Rhodes's characterization of the attitude of the former slaveholders toward the Negro is significant in this discussion. Pointing out that the slaveholder did not hate the Negro, he continues, "They did not believe that he could rise in the scale of civilization, nor did they wish him to rise, nnd they were indignant at the mention of a possible political or social equality." This attitude was made effective, according to the report which Carl Schurz sent the President. Of the people of the South, he said, that "while accepting the 'abolition of slavery,' they think that some species of serfdom, peonage, or other form of compulsory labor is not slavery and may be introduced without a violation of their pledge. Although formally admitting Negro testimony, they think that Negro testimony will be taken practically for what they themselves consider itS^orth.'"! The so-called "Black Codes" would have perpetuated what the moral judgment of the nation and the decision of arms had condemned. By act of the Mississippi legislature of 1865 a poll tax of one dollar was imposed upon Negroes between the ages of eighteen and sixty. "Failure to pay the tax," says Garner, "was to be deemed prima facie evidence of vagrancy, and it was made the duty of the sheriff to arrest the offender and hire him out for the amount of the tax plus the costs. . . . Civil officers were required to arrest freedmen who should run away from their contracts and carry them

* James Ford llliodes, Eisiory uf the United Staks, Vol. V, Chap. XXX, p. 553.

back to the place of employment." ^ The Black Codes, says Mr. Paul Leland Haworth, "were m part an honest effort to meet a difficult situation, but the old slavery attitude toward the Negro peered through most of them and gave proof that their framers did not yet realize that the old order had passed away." ^ That old orders do not speedily pass away has been almost too often demonstrated, especially when the old order is so inwoven in current thought and utterance that its influence is to most persons imperceptible. To an extent that few Americans realize the old order persists. It is justified on the ground of a variety of necessities, and draws into its entanglements human and political relations of every sort. It can stand against law and legislation better than against pitiless statement and publication of fact.

If the Black Codes throw light on the opposition to the Negro's economic advancement which persists to this day, present talk of Negro domination is illumined by the report of the joint committee of Congress

* JajTies Wilford Garner, Rccnnsfntrfinv iv Mississippi, 1901. New York: Macraillan Company. Pp. 114, 115.

- Paul Leland Haworth, Reconstruction and Union, 18Go-VJ12, New York; Ucnry Holt & Co. P. 16.

Into the activities of the Ku-Khix Klan. There is a wide divergence of opinion as to the justification for the outrages which were visited upon Unionists and Negro RepubHcans in the South. Justification is sought in the dangers from criminal vagrants, and the Ku-Klux bands who spread terror are compared with the posse comitatus of the West which rid the surrounding country of horsethieves and gamblers. But the divergence of opinion extends even to Southerners. Without imputing exclusively political motives to the white brotherhood, it is still possible to question the necessity for what was done, to inquire if fear rather than fact w?^s not its motive impulse. Gen. J. B. Gordon, who commanded the left wing of Lee's army at the surrender, was asked by the joint committee:

"Have the Negroes, as a general thing, behaved well since the war.^"

His reply was, ''They have behaved so well that the remark is not uncommon in Georgia that no race on earth, relieved from servitude under such circumstances as they were, would have behaved so well." ^

Report of the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condilion of Affairs in the late Insurrectionary Stales, 1872, Vol. I, p. 53. Washington; Government Printing Office. 2 17

Tlie faith which Negro slaves kept with their masters absent in the war, caring for white famihes, guarding white women and children, is proverbial. Under the circumstances, the actions of the white South during Reconstruction are referable rather to emotion than to situations requiring drastic response.

"The excuse that the whites were goaded into such outrages by the evils of Negro domination," says Doctor Haworth of the Ku-Klux, '*is true only in part, for the Klans displayed notable activity in opposing the new state constitutions and in the election of state officers before the blacks were yet in power." ^

"The five and a half million whites," says Rhodes, "who were legislating for three and a half million blacks were under the influence of 'the black terror' which was not known and therefore not appreciated at the North. Many of the laws were neither right nor farsighted, but they were natural." And then, as if to clinch the efficacy of the "terror" motive, he adds, "The enactments the least liberal as to civil rights and the most rigorous as to punishment of misdemeanors and crimes were those of South Carolina, Mississippi, and

Louisiana, in which states the proportion of Negroes to white men was the largest." ^ Situations change, but the style of argumentation on the race question seems forever to continue unchanged. In fifty-four years Negroes in the United States demonstrated that not only could they acquire the fundamentals of education necessary to participation in the processes of democratic government, but they have made progress that would be considered extraordinary when measured by any standards. Against the initial opposition and disbelief expressed in the Black Codes and subsequent disfranchisement in the Southern states ; against the repression most violently imposed by the Ku-Klux and still a part of the code of many white Americans, they have with relentless determination built business enterprise, gone to the land and made it yield to them, fought their way by sheer w^ork and talent into the closed ranks of the professions, furnished to the United States government district attorneys, consular and diplomatic officers, and against most determined opposition, military leaders and soldiers. In the commerce between cultured representatives of the Negro and white

} Op. cit, Vol. V, Chap. XXX, p. 558.

races, where the Negro is freed from the attitude of defense and awkward apprehension, and the white man has progressed beyond the savage canon which says that strangers are enemies, a reciprocity becomes possible that has a shght zest of adventure and challenges perception. From the point of view of such friendships, which the Southern code would bar, distinctions of color are as extraneous as those of nationality. It is at once tragic and laughable that the meanest white man whose universe is bounded by his local new^spaper and his own hates should take precedence over the colored student and artist; it is one of those ironies of w^liich the world is prodigal that by a rigid dogma enforced with all the conviction of inquisition, bounds should be set to the work of the scientist, that people should be misinformed, hates perpetuated and introduced in new fields, creative spirits checked and frustrated. As the emphasis of the modern state shifts and inclines from political achievement to the task of freeing men from the imposition of the deadening task and the drudgery of overwork, there come to mind words spoken by Governor Humphreys of INIississippi in his inaugural of 18G5:

'^The Negro, he said, was free, whetlier the people hked it or not, but freedom did riot make him a citizen or entitle him to poHtical or social equality with white men." ^

In those places where the Negro has achieved political equality with white men, that freedom still does not give him industrial equality. The Negro student of law, the university graduate, too often is free to vote in the same booth with the white man, but must seek employment as a Pullman porter. Of the denial of opportunity in the North which still prevails there is a survey in Miss Mary White Ovington's Half a Man.

Complications of political problems by passions rooted in race and sex are carried over into industry and for a time will make social organizations more difficult. If the prejudice against the Negro's voting and holding office is a matter of balance of power, the excuse being his alleged unfitness, the prejudice against him in industry will have to be met by extraordinary proof.

Unfortunately, the problem of the Negro's participation in political and civil life has seldom received precise formulation. It is admitted, though not universally, that he

^ Garner. Op. ciL, p. 111. 21 should be the equal of the white man before the law. The mequality here is in part a corollary of the development of law and legal procedure as instruments of class. In part it is due to a habit of mind so inured to prejudice that injustice and discrimination become routine. The demands of the political state differ from the demand of blind justice whose unseeing gaze supposedly rests neither on dark skin nor meager purse. But the political state and democracy especially are entitled to no further questions than: Can you read and write.'^ Are you capable of understanding the issues upon w^hich, as an elector, you will be required to pass? With these questions the peculiar biological disposition of the Negro has nothing to do. Granted that he might in his own environment, played upon by streams of culture— the arts, literature, political thought — evolve a civilization different from the one in which he is placed. The question remains : Can and does the colored citizen of the United States conform to the minimum requirements of political democracy .f^ If he can and does meet the test, which in effect asks him if he is a human being, by what justification is he deprived of his prerogative.^ To state the question is to answer it. Politics has no concern, under the theory which is supposed to dominate American procedure, with questions properly referable to anthropologists. Those questions, be it said, involve measurements and observations more delicate than would be conceded by the persons who invoke the questions. In the play of political life, which has consisted in endeavoring to make recalcitrant fact fit the mold of men's desire, the colored United States citizen has been the victim of extraneous issues, created and constantly invoked by those who in effect want to divorce the practice of American government from the affirmations upon which, presumptively, it rests.

Such discussion seems academic when it is opposed to the brute realities with which American public opinion is faced. Colored citizens of the United States are still publicly burned alive at the stake. Much editorial discussion states rather than implies that colored people are less than beasts of the field. Many a Mississippian will affirm, as the Jackson, Mississippi, Daily News did on June 20, 1919, ''that the door of hope is forever closed to the Negro, in so far as participation in politics is concerned, and there is no appeal from that decree."